Archive for September, 2010

Michael Hudson-Doyle

September 27th, 2010 by Michael Hudson-Doyle

1 Comment

As part of the infrastructure team for Linaro, I’m working on various kinds of build service — particular image builds and package builds. Both of these involve running things like ‘apt-get update’ and ‘debootstrap’ a lot, and for as I’m in New Zealand and the servers these commands pull from are in London, a caching proxy between the board and the internet makes things go a _lot_ faster.

On Michael Hope‘s recommendation I installed polipo which seems to mostly work, although it seems to fall over whenever I sleep my laptop, which is a bit lame. I have it configured to listen on 10.0.0.1 and answer requests from 127.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.0/24 (so I can point programs running on my laptop at it if I want/to test it’s working). My config file looks like this:

The only non-trivial thing to figure out was the dnsUseGethostbyname thing — this is required for hostnames in /etc/hosts to be resolved by the proxy, something that matters when the board is trying to download files from “librarian.launchpad.dev”.

Then it just remains to set http_proxy to http://10.0.0.1:8123/ in .bashrc on the board and allow the http_proxy environment variable to be passed though sudo by adding the following line using visudo:

Defaults env_keep += "http_proxy"

Then just enjoy the better performance of the package manipulations (after the first time, at least).

Then I made a ssh key, added it to my account on Launchpad and put the ssh key from my laptop into .ssh/authorized_keys.

Michael Hudson-Doyle

September 21st, 2010 by Michael Hudson-Doyle

2 Comments

Setting up networking on the Beagle xM is a bit of a pain. The ethernet port is wired up in some weird way via the USB subsystem (so the interface ends up being called “usb0″) and there’s no MAC address in the EEPROM on the card, so it gets a random MAC address every time you bring the interface up, which makes making DHCP do what you want something of a chore.

What follows is what I’ve done. It may well not be anything like optimal, but it seems to work. I access the internet here at the office via wifi, and wanted to share the connection to the xM via my laptop’s ethernet port. There’s a wiki page about this but for whatever reason the network manager method of connection sharing didn’t work at all for me.

1. Choose a name for the board (I chose “bitty” for some reason).

2. Configure dhclient on the board to send this as its hostname when asking for a lease by adding “send host-name “bitty”;” to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

3. On the laptop, use Network Manager to give the ethernet port a static address of 10.0.0.1.

4. Install dnsmasq. This is a DNS + DHCP server.

5. Configure dnsmasq. Predictably, I can’t remember all the things I’ve changed in here. I think I added “interface=eth0″, “dhcp-range=10.0.0.50,10.0.0.100″ and “dhcp-host=bitty,10.0.0.45,1h” to respectively answer dhcp on the wired ethernet port, do dhcp at all and to assign a particular address to the machine that calls itself “bitty”.

6. I then followed the iptables and other instructions from the “Gateway set up” section of the aforementioned wiki page.

7. Restarted dnsmasq.

10. Added “10.0.0.45 bitty” to /etc/hosts on the laptop

11. Run “dhclient usb0″ as root on the board (via the serial console).

You should now have network! So you can run “apt-get update” and so on like a good citizen.

Looking at the above list of instructions, I don’t know why I bothered with DHCP and didn’t just configure everything statically on the board, especially as the above has the following problem: when you restart the board and run dhclient the board has a new MAC address, but as the dhcp server thinks that 10.0.0.45 is still leased to the address the board had before the reboot it doesn’t hand out the desired. The fix for this is “sudo rm /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases” “sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart” but that seems like an utter hack.

That’s enough for one post, next will be a brief reminder (mostly for myself) on how to set up users from the command line and then I’ll talk about more me-specific things like setting up a caching proxy to make debootstrap go much faster.

Michael Hudson-Doyle

September 20th, 2010 by Michael Hudson-Doyle

2 Comments

After I’d unpacked and booted my xM, I wanted to install a Linaro daily build on it. This was actually fairly complicated for me because of a few bugs I ran into on the way, but as they’re all fixed now I’ll describe the way it’s meant to work

Once you’ve downloaded the file (using dlimage or just boringly) and run linaro-media-create with a command line like

(make sure you get the –mmc bit right!), pop the card into your board, power it up and with the serial console connected run “screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200″ again. The Linaro image is slightly different to the one that comes with the board in that you get a root prompt directly on the serial console, no need to log in.

As an aside, when I want to boot on a different card, I usually type ‘poweroff’ on the serial console, pull the card out, pop the new one in and press the reset button. I don’t know if this is the best process :-) There is a kernel bug that prevents clean shutdown after the card has been on for a while, but it happens late enough in the shutdown process that I ignore it.

Next up, I’ll talk about how I set up my cards for networking and general user-level hackery.

Michael Hudson-Doyle

September 20th, 2010 by Michael Hudson-Doyle

3 Comments

As I said in my previous post, I recently received a Beagle Board xM to test some of my work stuff on and also just to get a bit more familiar with the world of ARM development.

When I got the board, I had no idea what to do with it. None. There didn’t seem to be a guide that I could find with google for people with my level of utter inexperience, so I thought I’d try to write one up.

First things first, you need some gadgets. Well, to get started the only thing you really need is a USB->Serial adapter. I don’t know much about these gadgets but was recommended this one and it works fine for me. While you’re in the shop, you’ll probably want to buy a handful of microSD cards. The faster and bigger the better probably, but 2 gigs or bigger is fine for playing around. You’ll need some way of writing to these cards as well, of course.

The xM comes with a microSD card that contains “The Ångström Distribution”. I don’t know what this is really, but it’s good to test that the board works, so pop the card in the slot in the board and plug the board in (I agonized for ages about this — I didn’t want to just plug it in in case a brief power contact would damage the board or something, but it seems to be the thing to do). Then connect up the USB/serial adapter and run “screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200″. If the board has booted fully, you should get to a tty login. Type ‘root’ as the user name and you’re in! This default install is fairly plain — it’s a fairly minimal linux using busybox. But if it boots, the board likely at least somewhat works.

Next up is installing a Linaro daily build on the board and getting networking working so that you can install all the fun software that makes up Ubuntu!

If anything in this post strikes you as wrong or unclear, please let me know in the comments.

Michael Hudson-Doyle

September 19th, 2010 by Michael Hudson-Doyle

1 Comment

After three years of working on Launchpad, back in May I transferred over to working for Linaro. On the face of it, this was a large move, moving from hacking on a programmer-supporting tool to making Linux work better on ARM processors, but I’m not working on the kernel or anything, in fact I’m still working on programmer-supporting tools, even hacking on Launchpad a bit from time to time.

Last week I received an ARM board of my very own to play with, a Beagle Board xM. My first steps with this will be the subject of my next blog post…